Not long ago, there was a time when I was responsible for a
college with close to 30 departments and units, a budget of between 50 and 55
million dollars, 400 tenure-track faculty members, 700 staff, 10,000
undergraduate students, 2,000 graduate students, and 17 buildings. On any given
day, I had to deal with disciplinary proceedings, tenure and promotion cases,
faculty searches, chair searches, enrollment problems, fundraising, community
outreach, alumni relations, public relations, curriculum reform, counteroffers,
technology failures, space allocation, information systems, chair meetings,
advisory committee meetings, deans council meetings, meetings with the provost,
student complaints, faculty complaints, parent complaints, and taxpayer
complaints. Office hours were 8:30 a.m. to whenever and often extended into the
evenings and weekends. Vacations were few and far between. The pressure never
relaxed.
When I left the job slightly more than five years, I felt
that I had all the time (well, not quite all) in the world at my disposal, and
for a while, spent it by trying to improve everyone I met, whether or not those
I ministered to welcomed my efforts.
Although I was no longer a dean, I couldn’t shake the habit
of being at the office every day, all day. Because I had nothing in particular
to do, I roamed the halls looking for things that were wrong and I found them.
Stray pieces of furniture you couldn’t give away sat (or
sprawled) in front of an office door. I stuck my head in and informed the
occupant (why did he or she listen to me?) that the offending items must be
removed by the end of the day.
Continuing down the halls, I found the panels separating two
elevators festooned with announcements of lectures that took place two years
ago. I proceeded to rip the leaflets down. Halfway through I decided that no
one should be posting anything there anyway; so I removed every announcement,
no matter how current, and, for good measure, I tore away the surface the
announcements adhered to and threw all the thumbtacks and push-pins into the
trash.
I noticed that someone had left a small carton of books,
intended no doubt for impecunious graduate students who might have made good
use of them. I didn’t care; into the trash they went, too.
But then it was time to go to class (I was still teaching),
where, in an enclosed space, my students received the full force of my
reforming zeal. I told them that I hadn’t the slightest interest in whatever
opinions they might have and didn’t want to hear any. I told them that while they may have been taught that the
purpose of writing is to express oneself, the selves they had were not worth
expressing, and that it would be good if they actually learned something. I
told them that on basis of their performance so far they should sue their
previous teachers for malpractice. I told them that anyone who says “I know it,
but can’t explain it” would flunk the course.
After an hour and a half they escaped, except for one of
them, who came to my office for further instruction. Although it was the end of
the third week, she was still not quite sure about the structure of the basic
English sentence. (This, of course, was a reflection on me, not her.) I took
her through the subject and predicate slots and she seemed to understand who or
what an actor is, but she couldn’t quite get the concept of the object of the
action.
We were working with a sentence she had composed, “I threw
the book into the garbage.” I asked her, “In that sentence what is the
relationship between ‘threw’ and ‘book’?” She didn’t know. I tried again: “What
is the impact on the object of the action?” She didn’t understand the question.
I decided that an illustration might do the trick; so I
picked up a book on my desk and threw it. It hit a shelf of books a few feet
away. She said nothing for a few seconds and then asked in a voice calmer than
mine would have been, “Can I drop this course?” “Yes,” I answered (hoping to escape
prosecution), and she left – the one person in the entire week who managed to
get away.
